Volume 3, Issue 2 (Summer 2011) “Savagery” and “Civilization”: Dutch Brazil in the Kunst- and Wunderkammer Virginie Spenlé Recommended Citation: Virginia Spenlé, “”Savagery” and “Civilization”: Dutch Brazil in the Kunst- and Wunderkammer,” JHNA 3:2 (Winter 2011), DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2011.3.2.3 Available at https://jhna.org/articles/savagery-civilization-dutch-brazil-kunstkammer-wunder- kammer/ Published by Historians of Netherlandish Art: https://hnanews.org/ Republication Guidelines: https://jhna.org/republication-guidelines/ Notes: This PDF is provided for reference purposes only and may not contain all the functionality or features of the original, online publication. This is a revised PDF that may contain different page numbers from the previous version. Use electronic searching to locate passages. This PDF provides paragraph numbers as well as page numbers for citation purposes. ISSN: 1949-9833 JHNA 3:2 (Summer 2011) 1 “SAVAGERY” AND “CIVILIZATION”: DUTCH BRAZIL IN THE KUNST- AND WUNDERKAMMER Virginie Spenlé A hitherto unknown coconut cup from Dutch Brazil with carved representations sheds new light on the furthering of knowledge through pictorial representation that Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen promoted in the mid-seven- teenth century to add luster to his official image. Featuring representations of cannibals and “civilized” aboriginals, the cup suggests that “savage” Brazil was “civilized” under the peaceful leadership of the Protestant count. The same political message recurs on several other Brazilian artifacts once owned by Johan Maurits, who deliberately deployed his exotic Kunstkammer objects as diplomatic gifts to enhance his reputation as governor-general of Brazil. But when objects are integrated into a different collection context, they undergo a connotational paradigm shift. This process is easy to see in the provenance of the carved coconut cup. By the time Alexander von Humboldt owned the cup (ca. 1800), its political message had long since been obscured. Rather than an object attesting to political power, the carved coconut cup, like other “Brasiliana” from Johan Maurits’s collection, had come to be regarded as an objective illustration of Brazilian natural history. DOI 10:5092/jhna.2011.3.2.3 1 eginning with the Renaissance, Kunst- and Wunderkammers confronted visitors with ob- jects that were not only curious, rare, and precious but also informative about their owners: how they viewed themselves and what their aspirations were. This was especially true of Bcollections owned by reigning princes, in which the exhibits were intended to attest both to the powers of divine creation and humans’ artistic potential and to the role played by the prince in shaping the society he ruled. Whereas portraits on the wall illustrated the integration of the ruling dynasty into the spheres of politics and scholarship, scientific instruments and other precious arti- facts positioned the prince closer to divine wisdom. Concomitantly, they demonstrated that the ruler was in a position to define his territory by opening it up through science, to keep it under control, and to promote it.1 For example, turned art objects were charged with symbolism in the Kunst- and Wunderkammer context: they indicated the reigning prince’s ability to shape society, like raw material on a lathe, into a well-proportioned configuration.2 Exotic products, by contrast, usually alluded to a prince’s colonial achievements or ambition, referring vaguely to unsophis- ticated, remote lands as opposed to “civilized” Europe. Only rarely did such exotica depict the actual activities of colonizers in a non-European sphere.3 2 All the more remarkable, therefore, is a hitherto unknown coconut cup with reliefs (figs. 1, 2, 6, and 9) illustrating the concepts of “savagery” and “civilization” in Dutch Brazil in the mid-seven- JHNA 3:2 (Summer 2011) 1 teenth century. Although typical of Kunstkammer objects in many ways, the cup is exceptional, if not unique, because of its political iconography. As early as the Middle Ages, coconuts were prized as valuable natural commodities possessing therapeutic and apotropaic powers; hence they were usually worked into drinking vessels with costly mounts.4 Carvings on the bowls of such vessels occasionally evoked biblical stories such as “The Drunkenness of Noah” and “Lot and His Daughters,” warning drinkers of the consequences of excessive consumption of wine.5 On the oth- er hand, there are representations, albeit rare ones, reflecting the exotic qualities of the material itself. As far as I know, only six carved coconut cups survive with depictions of indigenous peo- ples of South America and allusions to the activities of Dutch colonists in the Americas: the most famous of the six came from the Kunstkammer established by the Electors of Saxony and is now in the Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault) in Dresden (inv. no. IV 325). Then, in addition to the cup under discussion here, there is a cup once owned by Ferdinand Albrecht I of Brunswick-Wolfen- büttel, which is now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig (inv. no. Hol 99). The others are in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich (inv. no. R 5338), the Historisk Muse- um (inv. no. B 513) in Bergen, Norway, and a private collection.6 3 The present work of art adds a crucial study object to this small group of coconut cups with Brazilian representations. Moreover, the provenance of this vessel provides insights into later responses to mid-seventeenth-century representations of Brazil. The cup was owned by Alexan- der von Humboldt, the Berlin naturalist and explorer who made such a vital contribution to the scientific exploration of South America in the early nineteenth century. In the following essay, the iconography of Humboldt’s covered cup will be examined with respect to the cup’s function in Johan Maurits’s Kunst- and Wunderkammer so that its history can be used to reconstruct the changing interplay of power, art, and science in the context of the early modern world and mod- ern ideas about collecting. “Savagery” and “Civilization” in Dutch Brazil: The Iconography of the Humboldt Cup 4 The Humboldt coconut cup (fig. 1) consists of a carved nut mounted on a tall foot and held in place by three silver braces. Although the silver mount is fairly simple in appearance and bears no marks, the bowl of the cup is elaborately decorated with three relief fields. Fig. 1: The Humboldt Cup, Dutch, 1648–53, carved coconut, chased silver mount, no marks, height: 29 cm. Private collection (Photo: Munich, Kunstkammer, Georg Laue) Fig. 2: Humboldt Cup (detail) JHNA 3:2 (Summer 2011) 2 5 The first scene (fig. 2) features “savage” indigenous peoples: a woman with a basket bound to her forehead and a naked warrior. The warrior carries a club in his hand and two spears over his shoulder. He is unmistakably characterized as an Indian by his feather headdress, which was worn by the Tupinambá and other peoples of the Amazon Basin and from the sixteenth century on was regarded as an identifying attribute of American Indians in general.7 The Tupinambá lived on the coast of Brazil and were notorious in Europe for their practice of cannibalism. The Frankfurt publisher Theodor de Bry contributed decisively to the reputation of these indigenous peoples as cannibals. The third volume of his widely circulated Grands Voyages (1592) contains eyewitness accounts furnished by Hans Staden and Jean de Léry of French attempts at establishing a colony in Brazil (1548–58).8 From then on the Brazilian Indians were regarded as prime examples of the “savage native.” Confirming the prejudices of post-Renaissance Europeans, the woman accompa- nying the warrior on the Humboldt cup is characterized as a cannibal: in her left hand she holds a severed hand and a human foot protrudes out of the basket bound to her forehead (fig. 2). 6 Indeed, the female cannibal with a severed foot in her basket became a popular motif in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The motif was introduced by the Dutch painter Albert Eckhout, who stayed in what is now Brazilian territory from 1637 to 1644 to document, along with other artists and scholars, the achievements of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen in Dutch Brazil. Eck- hout based his figures on members of the Tapuya (actually Tarairiu) tribe,9 who inhabited the coastal hinterland of eastern Brazil. Upon returning to Europe, Eckhout painted from oil sketches (now lost) the large-format pictures, with life-size figures, presented by Johan Maurits in 1654 to King Frederick III of Denmark to decorate the Copenhagen Kunstkammer (fig. 3).10 The paintings might seem to view the indigenous peoples of Brazil objectively. However, the painter exploited stereotypes that had become commonplace in European painting. Since the sixteenth century, the severed limbs of victims had figured as principal attributes of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.11 The woman carrying a severed foot undoubtedly represents a nod to the previously mentioned series of engravings published by De Bry, who had stigmatized the Tupinambá, the tribe whose territory adjoined that of the Tapuya, as cannibals. It was, in fact, the unlikely combi- nation of studied allegory and empirical observation that made Eckhout’s paintings so successful. Fig. 3: Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Woman, 1646–53, oil on canvas, 272 x 161 cm. Nationalmuseet, Etnografisk Samling, Copen- hagen, inv. no. N38A1 (Photo: Fig. 4: Inhabitants of Brazil after Albert Eckhout, 1648, Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet, woodcut. From Willem Piso and Georg Markgraf, Historia Etnografisk Samling) rerum naturalium Brasiliae (Leiden, 1648), p. 280 7 Eckhout’s representations of ethnographic types were especially interesting to the artists and natu- ralists who had accompanied Johan Maurits to Brazil. The young Dresden painter Zacharias Wa- JHNA 3:2 (Summer 2011) 3 gener copied Eckhout’s oil sketches in his Thierbuch, in which he wrote an account of his travels.12 Of paramount importance for viewer response to Eckhout’s pictures, however, were the woodcuts included in Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae by the German naturalist Georg Markgraf, another member of Johan Maurits’s entourage in Brazil.